


The Talking Cure

by rachelindeed



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution - Nicholas Meyer
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:40:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24483673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelindeed/pseuds/rachelindeed
Summary: A little honest conversation goes a long way.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 34
Kudos: 41
Collections: Holmestice Exchange - Summer 2020, More Holmes





	The Talking Cure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Callie4180](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callie4180/gifts).



> Happy Holmestice, Callie4180! You said that you liked stories of self-discovery, a theme that seemed resonant with the world of _The Seven-Per-Cent Solution_.
> 
> Nicholas Meyer's novel dealt with some subjects that deserve to be warned for, so I am putting a summary of the relevant points below:
> 
> The book rewrites the story of Reichenbach in unexpected ways. It begins when Watson discovers, to his horror, that Holmes's cocaine addiction has spiraled out of control. In his drugged paranoia, Holmes develops the delusion that James Moriarty, his old math tutor, is a criminal mastermind. With Moriarty's reluctant assistance, Watson manages to lure Holmes to Vienna, where Sigmund Freud helps him to wean himself from the narcotic. (Historically, Freud did initially prescribe cocaine to his patients, and took it himself, before realizing its dangerous nature and speaking out against it.) At the end of the novel, Freud uncovers a tragedy in Holmes's past that explains his subconscious animus toward Moriarty: when Holmes was a child, his tutor had an affair with his mother, and in response Holmes's father first murdered her and then killed himself. Freud believes this childhood trauma explains many aspects of Holmes's character. Holmes needs time alone to recover and reflect, so he takes a hiatus and Watson fabricates the tale of "The Final Problem" to cover his absence and protect his painful personal secrets.
> 
> By necessity, this fic refers to those events and subjects. But they are all in the past, and there is no drug use or violence in the events of the fic itself.

**Sigmund Freud, February 1892**

Library of Congress, James Madison Memorial Building, Manuscript Division

Sigmund Freud Papers: General Correspondence

Freud to Unidentified Recipient

MSS39990, Box 44

 _Item description:_ A single page of a longer letter, the beginning and end of which have been lost. This appears to be correspondence with a prospective patient, for Dr. Freud urges them to consider accepting "the services which I have gratis offered." The prospective patient had suffered emotional trauma of an unspecified nature many years previously. Freud wrote: "Having learned of the tragedy, I would like to turn that knowledge to some good. I feel sure that it has weighed on you, so much so that you may not be fully conscious of its impact. Over the summer, will you not come again to see me? I daresay there have been few with whom you could ever discuss it. I promise I shall not treat you as an invalid or an hysteric. But I believe 'the talking cure,' as my colleague has dubbed it, has beneficial effects for many who have had to repress strong feelings or painful memories in order to get on with life. Having pursued a profession devoted to orderly thought, rationality, and logic, I would urge you once more to consider the…" Here the page ends.

 _Note:_ The blots, corrections, and re-wordings upon the manuscript page make clear that this was a draft letter. It would most likely have been recopied before being sent, if indeed it was ever mailed. 

Though incomplete, this fragmentary correspondence may be considered of interest for showcasing a somewhat uncommon side of Freud's therapeutic practice. Freud specialized in working with patients who were exhibiting notable psychosomatic symptoms or neuroses which he believed were caused by hidden traumas in their past. He was interested in repressed memories and unconscious wounds. In this case, there is no indication that the patient was exhibiting such symptoms, and the 'tragedy' referred to was one of which both Freud and his patient were consciously aware. One of his biographers has speculated that Freud had some personal motivation for offering his services in this instance, though no scholar has so far ventured to guess the identity of his correspondent.

**John Watson, December 1893**

Late one evening, very shortly after I released my account of "The Final Problem" to the public, Professor Moriarty came to call.

The agitated raps he beat on the door of my surgery went unheard, for the maid had departed hours before. I was upstairs preparing for bed, the wind roaring outside my window. The winter had turned bitter in the closing month of the year, with snowdrifts piling up at such a pace that the city trains foundered on vanishing tracks, unable to advance or retreat. The streets were becoming impassible even for hardy cab horses, and nearly the whole of London was at a standstill. I had seen no patients in days, for such beastly weather put a stop to all cases save emergencies. Indeed, when I heard the faint cry of my name from the street below, I charged down the stairs and flung open the front door, expecting carnage.

Looping my arm through that of the indistinguishable, sodden figure huddled on my stoop, I guided him quickly into the parlour and had taken his hat before I recognised the man. I must have given a sudden start, perhaps even an exclamation, for he straightened by halting degrees and pivoted to face me.

He was shaking badly, though whether more from cold or fury I could not say. He was a slight creature, Mr. Moriarty, and being now well north of fifty, seemed to feel the night's chill down to his bones. His bald head was at a level with my shoulder and the wind had chafed it red from pate to chin, his spectacles half frosted over. His coat hung shapelessly about him, its dusting of snowmelt beginning to drip on the floor. He wore a look of wounded outrage, and my hackles rose in answer.

"Dr. Watson," said he in his wavering voice, "I had not taken you for such a villain."

I barked a laugh. Of all the brazen, damnable cheek. 

"Professor Moriarty," said I with cold formality, "pray take a seat and give me a moment to rekindle the fire. I was halfway to bed, as you see." I was starting to shiver, too, standing by the draughty chimney in nothing but my night-shirt and dressing gown, feet bare on the rug. "We may as well make ourselves comfortable. For if you've half as much to say as you have to answer for, we shall be here all night."

I ignored his choked sputter, turning my back and addressing my attentions to the grate. The embers from the day's fire had cooled to ash, and it would be too much trouble to light new coals at this hour. I dug into the kindling box and made due with a few armfuls of timber and newspaper. The sweet smell of maple smoke lingered on my sleeves.

By the tepid light of the new fire, Moriarty looked pallid and overwrought. "Why have you done this?" His voice carried the same hapless whine that had so irritated me in all our previous dealings. "What could have possessed you to publish such malicious lies? You have made me out to be…to be the criminal of the century! That's utter _madness_ , sir, as you well know. We took your friend all the way to Vienna to cure him of this delusion, and I thought we had succeeded? Yet now I find he has passed it on to you, and you have spread it about all of London and soon enough far beyond that!" He cradled his head in his hands, rocking violently in his chair. "God help me, there'll be no end of it. It can't…it _can't_ be undone!" 

As contemptible as I found him, the sight of his despair surprised a prickle of guilt from me, irrepressible. It had been nearly three years since I'd seen him in person, and it had been easy to forget how helpless he could seem. As I'd written my story, the Moriarty of Holmes's nightmares had become almost real to me.

And of course, in a way, he was real: for, however pathetic a figure he cut, this man had long since proved himself the opposite of harmless.

"I'm well aware that you've committed no crimes under the law," I said. "And I trust that you, in turn, are aware that the profound pain you've caused still deserves redress. If my story is in the nature of a personal attack, then I have made it on moral, not legal, grounds." 

"For God's sake, sir! You cannot be serious!"

"I assure you, I have never been more so."

He threw his spindly arms up. "You cannot honestly believe that a love affair of thirty years ago, however tragic its consequence, justifies you in blasting my life to ruins?"

"You exaggerate, sir. A modicum of notoriety attached to a name as common as yours will hardly ruin your life. The Moriarty of my story is dead, after all, which should discourage the general public from equating him with you."

He opened his mouth to object, but I cut him off. "If a hint of shame and a trace of suspicion dog your footsteps from now on, it is no more than justice — and little enough justice at that. Furthermore, let us be clear: this is not about your affair with Mrs. Holmes."

He gaped at me.

"The affair was the least of your failings, man!" I rose to my feet, a restless temper seizing hold of me and demanding movement. "You did wrong, yes, as did she; but frankly, such dalliances are too commonplace to be shocking. Hurtful, certainly, but even there — I know nothing of her marriage apart from how brutally it ended, but I doubt that any husband resorts to such horrific violence as his _first_ abuse."

After a tense pause, Moriarty stuttered, barely audible. "It was not … Not his first abuse, no."

"Granted, then, the collapse of their union was more his doing than either of yours."

Moriarty lifted his hands to me, open-palmed, in wretched confusion. "Then why — "

"I despise you for running for your life, for leaving a helpless woman — your lover! — to die undefended." He flinched sharply, his mouth twisting open in the shape of a cry, though no sound escaped. "For leaving the children in your care at the mercy of a rampaging murderer who, in his frenzy, might as easily have shot them as himself! How _dare_ you have fled, with those children still in the house?" 

I rounded on him, and he shrank back before me. "You abandoned every one of the innocent people who had a right to depend on you. I despise your cowardice, I despise your selfishness, and I despise your success in escaping the trail of destruction you left behind, partaking in none of that suffering which has haunted my dearest friend. His family was destroyed; he was left with permanent injuries of heart, mind, and spirit. In grappling with that pain, he set himself upon a path that nearly cost him both life and sanity!" My chest was heaving, and my voice had risen almost to a shout. I forced myself to still the anger trembling in my hands. "In every conversation we've ever had, you have had the gall to act hard done by. But tell me, sir, what exactly have your mistakes ever cost _you?"_

Silence stretched alongside the shadows of the half-lit room as we caught our breaths.

Professor Moriarty stared up at me. Anguish twisted harshly across his face, but at the same time a curious calmness seemed to overtake him. I had expected another cringing protest, but though his shoulders shook and a few tears ran, his gaze rose with new stubbornness to meet mine. I emerged from my temper far enough to regain the palpable sense that I was facing another man, neither scarecrow nor fiend.

His chin tilted up and slightly sideways. Its angle — so precisely balanced between challenge and inquiry — landed like an unexpected blow between my ribs. "What exactly should my mistakes have cost me, Dr. Watson?"

I blinked, struck dumb for a moment at his flash of resemblance to my absent friend.

"My life?" he pressed quietly. "My livelihood? My freedom? You have not hesitated to appoint yourself my judge and jury, but even so, I think I had a right to answer your accusations before you set me upon the pillory." He sighed, pressing the heel of one hand to his temple with every appearance of exhausted grief. "I don't believe I could have saved anyone that day, had I stayed. I truly don't. You are not wrong to call me a selfish coward, for once the gun came out I had no thought except to run. That much is true. But in the years since, I have not lived so free from guilt as you seem to think.

The past is a wound that has harried me once or twice in daylight, twice or thrice in sleep," he said. "I've felt its sting here and there, you see. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that I sit before you unmarried and childless. No coincidence, perhaps, that I'm stamped with an anxious humour, too quick to appease — it's why you had no respect for me, isn't it? Even before you learned of my history." 

I frowned at the implicit accusation, but could not deny it. There was a simper in his manner that had repelled me from the first. He studied me for a moment, his eyes still watery but the mind behind them coming more clearly into focus.

"You don't like weaklings," he observed, quite matter-of-fact. "At school I imagine you stood up against bullies for the sake of your friends or in defense of most younger lads. But not if you didn't like them. Not if they were whiners, always putting on airs. You scrubbed their faces in the dirt yourself, most likely, and came away feeling you'd done them a favour: someone had to teach them not to be prigs. I've seen your sort in the schoolyard a hundred times."

This vision of myself went so against the grain that I could not hold back an incredulous chuckle. I opened my mouth to retort, but pulled up short as a memory intruded: a willow wood handle twisting bluntly in my hand as little Tadpole Phelps, puffed up and furious, crumpled like a rag doll over his barked shins.

The dismay on my face was not lost on the professor. 

"Make no mistake," he said, "that is the level of moral 'justice' you have dealt out here, and with as little foresight as any of my third-formers." He rose from his chair and began to pace, vibrating with nervous energy. "Had you paused to reflect before sending your story to print, you might have remembered that Master Sherlock visited my headmaster three years ago to complain about me. I told you as much when first we met. He told him that I was a master criminal, embellishing his accusations with many details identical to those you have just made public. Immediately thereafter, I took a leave of absence and traveled to the continent in order to help you get your friend the treatment he so badly needed. 

Once your story crosses my headmaster's desk, he is going to take it as confirmation of those earlier accusations. Upon consulting his payroll ledger, he will see that I was away from my post, unaccounted for — and presumably murdering Sherlock Holmes! — in early May of 1891. Quite obviously, he will then call the police and recount all this, at which point I will be arrested and brought in for questioning. I will have no choice but to reveal the truth, either to the police or to a public court should the case advance so far. Either way, the Holmeses' most private and painful secrets — not to mention my own — will get out, first to Scotland Yard and then to the papers, and the scandal will sink us all together!"

I stared at him, aghast. Seeing at last a reflection of his own panic in my face, he waved a hand in my direction as if to congratulate me for catching up. 

"Good God, you might have said so to begin with," I managed weakly. I sank into my chair, sincerely horrified.

"Why do you think I came to you through this godforsaken snow with my breath in my fist? I'm here because I daren't go home — that's the first place any constables will come looking." 

We stared at each other, the apprehension in our eyes abruptly making allies of us. I shook my head, attempting to rally myself. "We'll just have to hope that matters haven't yet reached such a pass. I will pay a call to your headmaster — what was his name? — "

"Price-Jones."

"Price-Jones. Give me his address. I will see him first thing in the morning, and I have from now till sunrise to think up an explanation that will satisfy him. He won't go to the police — I will convince him that he mustn't."

Professor Moriarty looked wearily into my face, then nodded, more than ready to surrender the problem to me. "You have lied your way into this mess, Doctor. I should say it's up to you to lie your way out of it."

And so I did.

Moriarty spent the night in my guest room, collapsing to bed at around three in the morning. Sleep was, for me, impossible, but I fortified myself with a surfeit of coffee. Just before five, I wrapped up in my warmest clothes and ventured out. I paid a king's ransom to secure the first cab I encountered for an arduously slow ride to West London, and knocked on the door of the headmaster's home just before breakfast. He was as surprised as I had been to receive a visitor in such weather, but my mind was instantly relieved by his complacent welcome. By the grace of God, he had not yet caught wind of "The Final Problem."

His wife invited me to share their table, and afterwards we retired to his office for a private discussion. I told him, with all the sober conviction I could muster, that my friend Holmes, for the sake of a vitally important case, had committed himself to an undercover mission. The details were too confidential to explain, but the utmost secrecy about Holmes's whereabouts and activities must be preserved. To that end, I confided that my most recent story was a deliberate ruse designed to enable Holmes's temporary disappearance. We had turned to Professor Moriarty for help, as some years previously he had agreed to assist us in preparing for such an eventuality. Holmes, ever prescient about the sacrifices his profession might require, had taken the precaution of inventing a villainous alter ego in case the extreme step of shamming his own death should ever prove necessary. With Moriarty's permission, I was now putting those old rumours to good use.

Price-Jones accepted this balderdash with an excitement and wonder quite humbling to behold. He seemed thrilled to be brought in on the secret, and assured me that Professor Moriarty could rely on his discretion. If any students or parents tried to raise an inquiry at the school, he would staunchly insist that a coincidence of names was no grounds upon which to persecute a well-established teacher with no stain upon his record. I thanked him from my heart for his invaluable assistance in this matter, and after making my farewells, succeeded in walking out of sight before slumping against the nearest wall in weak-kneed relief.

On returning home, I found Moriarty sequestered in a chilly corner of my consulting room, hunched over an old copy of _The Lancet_. He raised his eyebrows in silent question, and I told him the crisis was averted. He lifted both hands to cover his face. Before leaving him to the privacy his wracked anxieties deserved, I lowered my eyes and apologised as directly and simply as I knew how. I had meant to embarrass him, not endanger him, but my poor judgement had nearly proved catastrophic.

He made no answer, nor did I expect him to. 

An hour later he emerged to join me for a supremely awkward luncheon, and I gave him a more thorough account of my conversation with Price-Jones. The atmosphere between us settled into one of tentative truce. 

He was on his way as soon as I reassured him that it was safe to go home. We parted with stiff politeness and what I assumed was a mutual wish never to meet again.

******

Two weeks later he reappeared on my doorstep like the proverbial bad penny.

The snow had cleared considerably, and pale sunlight caught brightly at the icicles dripping from every cornice. I ushered him in. We retreated once more to my parlour, where — rather nonplussed — I called for tea. 

He blew gently at his cup, angling it carefully to avoid fogging his spectacles. He appeared a good deal calmer than before, but an indefinable tension in the air warned me to expect unpleasantness.

Nevertheless, the gaze he levelled in my direction was considering, not hostile. I did my best to return it in kind.

"Dr. Watson," said Moriarty, "pardon me for calling on you again so soon." I formed the distinct impression that he had surprised himself, as much as me, by coming back.

"Not at all," I answered. He flitted his cup quickly back to its saucer to cover the slight flinch he couldn't repress — not at my words, but at the mere sound of my voice. I didn't know him well enough to be sure, but I thought: he expects to make me angry.

Though we would never be friends, I didn't relish the thought of any man fearing me or my temper. I tried to set him at ease. He answered my efforts with his own, and we made determined civilities. I heard about his students. He heard about my patients. The quarter hour passed into the half, and then a quarter to. Throughout our stilted conversation, I watched him silently debate whether to say to me whatever it was he'd come to say. More than once he looked searchingly into my face, his expression overtaken by some unspoken thought. I stifled both my impatience and my curiosity, having resolved not to press him.

The clock struck three and he began to make his excuses, thanking me and half-rising from his chair before wavering, half in and half out, then sinking back down with a frustrated sigh.

"Forgive me, sir," he said at last, in a far different tone. "I had intended to let matters rest, but … I find I'm not sure that I should. There is something — " His mouth pursed as he bit at the inside of his cheek. With a shake of his head, he leaned forward in his chair. "I think, perhaps, that I have something to tell you. Not with the intention of wounding you, although I know it will. I'm raising this only because I wish — " He broke off, dragging a wrist across his forehead. His eyes lowered to the carpet. "I do wish to make what small amends I can to Master Sherlock."

I was too surprised to know how to answer him. Without raising his eyes, Moriarty offered a small, wry grimace.

"I have spent some time, these last two summers, with Dr. Freud," he began. I made some slight exclamation at this wholly unexpected news, but Moriarty barely paused. "In helping Mr. Holmes, he’d come to learn of the tragedy, and he reached out to me. He guessed, correctly, that I'd never been able to talk it over with anyone, and he volunteered to support me should I choose to face up to the past. 

I didn't take kindly to the suggestion. For a long time, I resisted it entirely. But it was plain that without help, I would never untangle any of the old, awful mess, and I — " He huffed, waving a dismissive hand. "I was so _tired_ of it, you see. I'd like to tell you I felt some renewal of conscience or courage, but no. I didn't try to change for any of the right reasons, I suppose, but you'd never guess how exhausting it can be, simply to live with something like that. Unexamined, undisclosed, but so persistently _there_. I only rarely thought about it, but I was constantly having to think around it."

He glanced at me, perhaps expecting that I would not have understood the state he was trying to describe. But for the first time, I looked back at him with honest fellow feeling. No veteran of Maiwand could be a stranger to such sentiments.

I knew how a man might spend year after year stacking thought upon thought only to find that, no matter how pragmatically he ordered his head, he couldn't make of it a house in which to live comfortably. After all that layering, his mind still resembled an unplumbed well, smooth-walled and soft-shadowed, in which any dropped pebble could raise echoes.

"In the end," Moriarty continued, "I couldn't convince myself that ignoring it for another thirty years would make me any happier. So I depleted my savings for a train ticket to Vienna and placed myself at the mercy of an untried science. 

And at first, I must say, we made progress. His methods were sometimes bizarre, but Dr. Freud is a kind and intelligent man, at least, and over the course of our sessions I learned to break through a great deal of avoidance and to trace the outlines of my guilt without seizing up entirely. For the most part, he simply asked questions about what had happened and let me talk. There was genuine merit in some of his observations, and compassion in his judgments. Our time together helped me. That is why I was willing to return the following year."

He shifted, rubbing at his mouth. "Our second summer proved less harmonious, in large part because I lost confidence in his methods. He asked me to submit to hypnosis, to recount my dreams, to regurgitate as many meandering thoughts as possible, and his lines of questioning varied from nonsensical to puerile. For several weeks I was mystified as to what he hoped to achieve with all that fuss. Gradually, I began to see that he was searching for some malformation in my subconscious that would explain my choices, my desires and mistakes. 

But I cannot believe that men are as simple as ciphers, susceptible to all-in-one decoding if only the secret key can be found. I told Dr. Freud that I found his theories suspect, and that I saw no reason to think a man's defining traits must spring from common, unresolved roots in the subconscious. He assured me that such was the case, and for proof he spoke to me of Sherlock Holmes. His vocation as a detective, his aversion to women, his cocaine addiction, and the way his obsession with me drove him to the brink of self-destruction — all of it flowed from my affair with his mother, and his father's violent reprisal. I must acknowledge this and accept my responsibility."

Moriarty clasped his hands together in a combination of skepticism, nerves, and concern. "I'm not so sure that's true, Dr. Watson. In fact, I doubt it very sincerely."

"Do you, really?" I cried, incensed to hear Moriarty again denying the damage he'd done to my friend. His hands flew to the armrests of his chair, and his whole expression seemed to flicker as he braced himself for my outrage. I took a sharp, deep breath. Then two, then three.

I had been present when Freud had coaxed the truth from Holmes under hypnosis. I'd felt the stunning weight of revelation as so many facets of my friend’s character had traced themselves back to the great betrayals of his youth: his tutor’s wandering eye, his mother's infidelity, and his father's brutality. In the moment of discovery, the psychological effects of all this had seemed inarguable, like the grand conclusion to one of Holmes's most intricate cases. 

"Forgive me," I said nonetheless, gritting my teeth. I had refused to hear the professor out before, to my cost, and the mistake was too fresh to repeat lightly. "Pray go on. Let me hear your reasons."

Moriarty blinked at me, clearly shaken, but with a fresh glint of both relief and respect in his eyes. "Thank you," he said quietly, and then, "Rest assured, I'm not simply trying to dodge my own guilt. I know I hurt Master Sherlock terribly, and the tragedy had a profound impact on the course of his life. I simply think it premature to declare it the Rosetta Stone to his character. I suspect Dr. Freud’s single-minded attention to our sad affairs has led him, and you, to overlook other matters of importance. Lord knows I am no intimate of Mr. Holmes; I have not really known him since he was a boy, and so I may be wrong. But surely you're aware that when a man has no eye for women, there is more than one possible explanation."

I sat astonished at such a wildly unexpected swerve in the conversation. The implication was impossible to miss, and I stiffened abruptly — was this an attempt at blackmail? A threat to set an entirely different flavour of scandal racing through the city? 

Moriarty waved his hands preemptively. "I mean to make him no trouble, I assure you! Were I so unsavory a sort, I'd have had ample opportunity to spread that sort of rumour years ago. You must see that I've always gone out of my way to avoid embarrassing the Holmeses, and I don't intend any indiscretion now.” He blinked rapidly, taken aback by my visible alarm. “And as I say, I know nothing for certain. But you are his dearest friend and have been not only a doctor but an army officer. Surely you've seen enough of the world that inversion can't, as a mere possibility, shock you?"

"I am not shocked so much as incredulous," I retorted. "In all the years I’ve known him, in all the time we’ve spent together, I’ve never seen Holmes show any real partiality toward another man."

"Another man apart from you, you mean?"

I was momentarily incapable of reply, and Moriarty hurried on before I could gather myself to protest. "I have read your stories, you see. But whatever his inclinations may be, they are not the most important point I wanted to set before you. It's the cocaine and the patterns behind it that worry me. That is what I would beg you to re-examine.

I gather that, from university to middle age, Mr. Holmes remained a low-dosage addict. The loss of his parents may well have started him down that path, just as Dr. Freud believes, and his anger at me clearly wove itself into the practice upon some level, to have erupted the way it did later. But my point is simply that his habits, though unhealthy, remained fairly regular. You documented them in your novel: after fifteen years, he was still diluting his dosages down to a seven per-cent solution. Is that correct?”

It was. Holmes was a chemist, after all, and when he’d started his habit, seven per-cent had been a dosage widely deemed medicinal. Cocaine had come into fashion as a miracle drug and was put to every purpose under the sun, but at its inception, it was supposed to numb pain.

Moriarty went on. “Then something happened that unhinged him, and his deterioration accelerated rapidly. He was out of his senses and drowning in the drug before you or his brother knew anything was amiss, was he not?"

I nodded slowly. I had seen some increasingly alarming signs before the demands of my growing practice had carried us more fully out of touch, but nothing that could have prepared me for the madness into which Holmes had fallen by the spring of '91.

"That does not seem to me to fit very neatly into Dr. Freud's analysis," Moriarty persisted. "Why should his grief for the loss of his parents become suddenly unbearable twenty years after the fact? It's possible, of course; just as it’s possible that the addictive nature of the drug is in itself sufficient explanation for his sudden downfall. But before accepting either of those possibilities, it still seems necessary to ask whether some new grief might not have weighed on him. 

Can you think of nothing else, no seminal event around that time that might have caused him distress? Distress enough to drive him to replace his diluted version of the drug with constant doses far more potent and obliterating?"

I frowned, wholly at a loss. "No, I'm not aware of any personal or professional disaster at that time — or at any time since I've known him, for that matter — that might have prompted such a change. And even if something disturbing had occurred, I don’t see how you could have come to know about it."

Moriarty stared hard at me for a long moment. Then he raised a finger, rose, and walked to my bookshelf, where my own novels held pride of place. "I know because you wrote it down, Dr. Watson. Right here."

He returned to stand before me with The Sign of the Four in hand. Opening it to the final page, he held it out:

_“The division seems rather unfair,” I remarked. “You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?”_

_“For me,” said Sherlock Holmes, “there still remains the cocaine-bottle.” And he stretched his long white hand up for it._

"It seems likely to me that he escalated his drug use in response to your marriage," Moriarty concluded, almost gently. "Within a few years, he reached ruinous levels. For his sake, as well as yours, I thought … I thought perhaps someone should tell you so.”

Moriarty set the book back on the shelf and, remaining by the door, took hold of his hat, fumbling it from hand to hand. “I hope the both of you will forgive me for talking out of turn. I don’t know if any of these suppositions are true, but — he may need your help to get beyond all this, one way or another. That’s all."

I sat still, in mute disbelief, as Moriarty took his leave. For a long stretch afterward, there was nothing on my mind but the sounds of the clock, the fire, and the creak of my own chair.

It was impossible. To have misunderstood Holmes for so many years — I, who knew him best in the world? It hurt me even to entertain the idea. Of his love for me, and mine for him, I’d never been in doubt, but his affection had no more exceeded the bounds of friendship than had mine.

I knew the lines of his face, the expressions of his eyes. I had charted his most mercurial moods through fair weather and foul. And even if all my years of living and working alongside him, of writing books devoted to him, had been insufficient to teach me to read him true — I had seen his soul bared in the most desperate, deplorable extremity. I had stayed with him through the worst ordeal, when the torment of weaning his body from its addiction had stripped away his last semblance of self-control. He had raved and screamed, sobbed and begged. He had been incapable of hiding anything in that state, yet never had he said a word to me that might be construed in such a way.

Had he?

I forced myself to consider. To dredge up the worst of his words and weigh them. The misery of those dreadful hours was branded into my memory.

He had told me how stupid I was. Of course, in his right mind he could never have been so cruel, but even knowing that he was beyond reason, I’d still been stunned by his vituperation. I had never suspected that my slowness at the deductive side of casework could have inspired such awful resentment. On the contrary, I had always thought that he rather enjoyed keeping me in suspense. I’d been as confused and astonished as I was hurt by the agonizing bitterness pouring out of him. He’d screamed at me: that I understood nothing, that my blindness was crippling, that I drove him to despair. That he wished to God he had never met me, never burdened himself with a companion so utterly hopeless.

Hopeless.

With a blooming bruise of heartache, I began to see with new eyes. 

**Sherlock Holmes, April 1894**

I emerged from my bedroom to find that the morning post had brought another letter from Watson, and the chemist’s boy had already come by with today’s deliveries. 

Madame Brémont’s light fare suited me rather better than the hearty Scottish breakfasts of Baker Street, but the friendly sight of Watson’s looping script beside my plate touched off a pang of homesickness sufficient to rattle my appetite. I tucked a heel of fresh bread into my trouser pocket and slipped the letter into my waistcoat. I’d have had time to read it before walking to the lab, but his correspondence was a pleasure I preferred to savour. 

I nearly ran into the maid on my way down the stairs, and seeing that I was carrying a jar crooked in each arm, she kindly offered to fetch me a basket. Thus fortified, I arrived at the university with my acetate of potassium no worse for wear. With my work table facing east, the glare through the windows made most mornings something of a trial. Even after nine months in Montpellier, the Mediterranean sun still surprised me with its intensity. 

I devoted my attention to phenacetin, emerging from the processes of synthesis only long enough to congratulate young Frères on the progress of his thesis. The bells of the Cathédral Saint-Pierre punctuated the day, and every so often, when I moved the right way, Watson’s note crinkled in my pocket with a soft, cheering sound.

At half past five I washed out my flasks, finished my notes, and meandered over to the Jardin des Plantes across the street. It had become my habit to read my letters in the little English garden tucked away on the far side of the park, beside the lotus pond.

In recent months, there’d been a shift in the tone of Watson’s correspondence. Nothing overt or easily defined, but now and then I was brought up short when a tinge of hesitance or a flair of ardency cropped up in uncharacteristic places. I had a more confident grasp on Watson’s voice than on that of any other man, and had only grown more attuned to it during my years of travel. His letters had kept me company through many long journeys. The changes in the tenor of his words, even changes as delicate as these, stirred up cautious hopes in me. 

I was left questioning my resolutions yet again.

Watson had the bad habit of telling his stories backwards, but I might finally have outdone him. For years the most constant, incontrovertible thought in my head had been: I cannot go back to him until I sort myself out. But my weeks and months in France had finally worked a slow transposition, such that nowadays I was as often convinced: I cannot sort myself out until I go back to him. 

I was progressively more inclined to think that the course of my future — whether as a scientist in Europe or a consulting detective revived from the grave — was one I need not, and _ought_ not, decide alone. Watson deserved a say in it, and in order to grant him one, I would first have to lay myself open.

In his recent letters, I seemed to catch implied invitations to confide in him. But what I had to confide could not be committed to paper, and my unease at the prospect of returning to England had never quite faded. I’d pushed all that aside at the time of Mrs. Watson’s passing and stayed with my friend through his first awful weeks of bereavement. But for the rest of my hiatus, I’d avoided all the places I’d once called home. My solitary, fevered existence during those last few years at Baker Street assumed such an awful aspect in hindsight that I couldn’t stomach the idea of revisiting the place while so much else in my life was still unresolved. If there was a safe corner of the world in which to sit down with Watson and untangle the past, it was not to be found in London.

During the years we’d lived together, I’d never seriously considered confessing my feelings. I took it to be an impossibility, and although my longing blazed fiercely at times, a friendship as all-encompassing as ours could not leave me truly unhappy. Our life at Baker Street had been almost conjugal, lacking only the bedroom. I mistook my contentment with that arrangement for proof that my passion for him was a mere inclination — not a need — and could be neglected without too heavy a cost. It took his marriage to teach me otherwise. 

By then it was too late to speak, nor would I have been so disloyal as to intrude upon him or his wife with my own troubles. It was impossible to resent Mrs. Watson once I really knew her, or to blame Watson for following his heart. But as for me, I was wretched, not only at his loss, but at his perfect ignorance of _being lost_ to me. For in his eyes, very little between us had changed.

I could not have explained my misery to him, and so, perforce, I hid it, along with the increasingly potent means by which I sought relief. He and I had drifted apart, even as self-loathing spindled itself through my heart’s old fault lines. Ever since I lost my parents, I’d had a visceral revulsion toward the thought of adultery, and to find myself in love with a married man was appalling. Illicit desire had unearthed in me a distressing resemblance to my old tutor that I could not root out. 

Such was the clay that built the bricks of my addiction. I followed that well-paved road very nearly to hell.

I survived, deeply grateful for the second chance that the love of my friends and the intervention of Dr. Freud had given me. But I was puzzled as to what to do with this life that had been pulled back from the brink. 

Even after all my wandering, I had not many more answers now than I’d had to begin with. But I did, at least, have a fresh letter to read. I drew the envelope from my pocket, and a light breeze rustled through the tall cedars behind me as I unfolded the single sheet within. 

_My dear friend,_ Watson wrote, 

_I have a proposal for you. I should very much like to pay you a visit in Montpellier. I won’t come under my own name, so as to avoid blundering about too obviously and disrupting your anonymity. If you do not object, then pray write back as soon as you may and I will make the necessary arrangements. The length of my stay I leave entirely in your hands. I am prepared to disrupt your peace for a week, a month, or for the full summer. I hope my company may provide you a diversion equal to all but the very best coal tar derivatives._

_It would mean a great deal to me to see you again._

_With affectionate regards,_

_JW_

The paper almost fluttered loose from my hands. In the space of a breath, after years of indecision, new certainties came showering into my lap:

He was coming to me. I was going to tell him, at last. 

And he already knew.

******

Watson arrived on a bright afternoon in the middle of May. After crossing the Channel to Calais he’d managed to catch an earlier train than planned, and so two hours before I expected him, a whiff of Bradley’s tobacco wafted through my open window at the lab. I looked up to see him standing just outside, cigarette in hand, one elbow propped on the mullion and a slender crown of cloudless sky framing his face.

We looked our fill, he and I. “Well met,” I said at last, and his shoulders shook a little with mischievous self-delight. He couldn’t have planned that better with a month to prepare. I tilted my head inquiringly. “Would you care to come in, monsieur?”

“Have I got to circle back around to the main door?” 

“You have, yes.”

“Give me a moment, then. I feel like I ought to be climbing a portcullis.”

It was five minutes before his quick steps crossed from the atrium into the lab. I rose, and we shook hands, the both of us brimming with suppressed excitement. He was clean shaven — probably an unnecessary sacrifice, but when a man is traveling _incognito_ and inexperienced at answering to a name not his own, such small, deliberate changes in appearance can serve as useful reminders. I had long since grown out a trim, neat beard for similar reasons, so neither of us looked quite ourselves. 

In the years I’d spent away from England, I had not so far been recognised, and since I was now publicly presumed dead, it had become all the more important to guard my privacy. I would return to my old life upon my own terms, or not at all.

We stood with our hands clasped warmly, quietly amazed at one other. The medical students nearby paid us no mind.

“Monsieur Dubois, how good it is to see you,” he said.

“Dr. Turner, the pleasure is all mine.”

He glanced around, taking in the room. “I’ve often thought of you here at your desk, cheerfully overrun with all manner of chemicals. But my imagination fell far short of the mark! I knew you were at a very venerable university, but I hadn’t expected to find your lab ensconced in a church that looks more like a castle.”

“Monastery,” I said. “The medical school was founded in the thirteenth century. Although I must say, for such a long-lived institution, I fear its roster of memorable graduates is short.”

“Indeed?”

I shrugged. “Petrarch attended the law school next door and thoroughly loathed it. Though I suppose, as an admirer of his poetry, I must be grateful that they failed to make a lawyer of him. The medical faculty expelled Nostradamus, the self-proclaimed prophet — surely no great loss. And Rabelais studied here.”

“His _Gargantua_ is too grotesque by half,” Watson said. “But it’s hard to argue with his motto.”

“Vivez joyeux,” I quoted. “Live joyously, for laughter is the provenance of man.” 

Watson smiled with his eyes. “Rather a direct rebuttal to _l’homme c’est rien, l’oeuvre c’est tout_ , now that I think of it.”

“Not a rebuttal,” I said, “if one works joyfully.”

His smile softened. “True.” He glanced at the instruments crowding my tabletop. “May I ask after your research?”

“I’m experimenting with aniline derivatives. They’re a promising family of analgesics, though none have yet been discovered that are strong enough to serve as anesthetics. Perhaps I’ll be fortunate enough to make advances in that direction. If not, there is still much to be learned about the potential for milder pain relief in medicines like this.” I gestured at the white, clumpy silt sitting in my flask. “This particular derivative was first synthesised a little over fifteen years ago and is now on the cusp of entering into medical use. It’s called paracetamol.”

Watson examined it with interest. “I’ve read about this. There was a German doctor, was there not, who published the first study of its effects only last year? If I recall correctly, he believed another, closely related derivative carried a lower risk of toxicity for his patients.”

“You are perfectly correct,” I said. “But my own preliminary research points in the opposite direction. Much more work will need to be done before any reliable safety pronouncements can be made. But I have great hopes for this drug.”

Watson looked steadily into my face, and I could see that he’d intuited the rest. He understood how much I hoped to find a drug doctors could accept as a definitive replacement for cocaine, which was still relied on to deaden pain in too many surgeries. Both pride and sympathy flitted through his eyes.

“Safe, effective pain relief is the Holy Grail of my profession,” he agreed. “I’m very pleased to hear that you consider these medicines so promising.”

It was a consolation that Watson thought my time researching here had been well-spent. Before coming to France, I had been adrift for too long, and a sense of shame lingered over those directionless years. Finding work worth doing had felt like stepping out of a mire and back onto solid ground.

After taking a few minutes to clean my instruments and store my samples, I took his arm and we strolled together to the small house I was renting on the Roue Fournarie. We spent the evening becoming gently re-acquainted and losing ourselves in circuitous, wide-ranging talk. Our desultory back-and-forths had been a staple of life at Baker Street, but had proved impossible to reproduce at a long distance.

We had dined, chosen our digestifs, and smoked through our pipes before a natural lull in the conversation deepened gradually to an expectant hush. We caught each other’s eyes.

The occasion doubtless called for eloquence, but I had none. I simply said, “My dear Watson, I thought I had a secret to tell you. But you already know it, do you not?”

“I believe so,” he answered gently. “But then again, I have been wrong before.”

I shook my head. He was not wrong this time; I could see it in his eyes. 

“Please be assured of me,” I urged him softly. “Absolutely assured.”

Colour rose, riotous, to our cheeks.

He made no immediate reply, but I felt neither dread nor suspense. I had been heard — I was pledged. Whatever answer he made me, his acknowledgment alone was a gift I had once despaired of; I would not underrate its worth.

“I cannot promise myself yet; at least, not as confidently as you do,” Watson said. “But I would like to take the time to learn more of my heart.”

“Then let me court you.” I twined my fingers through his. “We need not rush. We need not change very much at all. We shall have an understanding, that’s all, and see what comes of it.”

“Yes,” Watson said. “Yes, that’s precisely what I want. Our old friendship, but with the chance of more, if more comes naturally. That’s what I came to France to ask of you.”

A groundswell of tenderness overtook us both. I pressed his hands and stepped away before doing something foolish. I’d just promised him a slow courtship; it wouldn’t do to steal a kiss.

But in the back of my mind, oh, I did not forget where we were, or what liberties we might take with one another should his regard for me ever flower into desire. France was no Eden for lovers of our sort, not even in Paris. Discretion was usually expected and intolerance widespread. But the inclinations of our hearts would not subject us to arrest, nor the state of our sheets tempt the maids to blackmail. There had been no sodomy laws in France since the Revolution — all hail liberty, equality, and considerably more than fraternity.

I lowered my eyes quickly, lest Watson catch the direction my thoughts were straying. It would be for him to decide if and how we might touch, and that was not a conversation for tonight.

“What was it,” I asked instead, “that finally opened your eyes to my feelings?”

The look of chagrin on his face momentarily alarmed me, but he shook his head wryly and waved me back to my chair. “This will be a long story, and you shall have the whole of it presently.” He leaned over to place his hand on mine, his expression a queer mixture of concern, solicitousness, and mortification. “But I’m afraid the most honest answer is: I had the help of your evil genius.”

That was the very last answer I expected, and it raised such an unlooked-for tumult within me that we took the remainder of the evening to come to grips with it. 

Watson told me everything he could recall about his discussions with Moriarty. In many ways it was the most terrible way we could have spent our first night together. But where there is trust, even painful self-examination can evolve toward intimacy. As the night wore on, I found myself able to talk to Watson about my family and my childhood with a bittersweet openness that I had never before achieved.

Watson said, "When Moriarty brought up the question of inversion, my first thought was that he was a blackmailer. And I remember now — he told me that, had he wished to start rumours along such lines, he could easily have done so years ago. I've begun to think better of him, but … why would he hoard such secrets if he means no harm? Does he … has he held back some proof for all these years; some trifle from your school days with which to make a nuisance?"

"Not at all. No, the professor knows nothing for certain of my own inclinations; I was only a child when he knew me. It was Mycroft's history in that regard, not mine, that he was privy to."

"Mycroft!" Watson exclaimed.

"Oh, yes.” I paused, breathing deeply for a moment, knowing that if I began this story there would be no good place to end it. But Watson already knew the shape of this scar, at least in outline; I had no need to hide it. And the words were there, effortless to let go. 

“Mycroft left for Eton at thirteen,” I said, “and it was expected that I would go, too, when I was of age. But at seventeen Mycroft fell headlong into a love affair with another boy in his year. Such flings were more or less expected, but they were supposed to begin and end in the dormitories. My brother was never so half-hearted. 

He came home that Christmas, quite calm and earnest, to tell our parents that he could never marry; he and his lad had resolved to be for each other. He felt it only right to tell Father, for Mycroft thought in the circumstances that the estate should go to me and volunteered himself for disinheritance, to that extent, for the good of the family. But I'm afraid he got rather more than he bargained for. At that age Mycroft was perfectly generous and sensible, but likewise perfectly naïve, for we had both been indulged all our lives. Our father had always been prodigiously proud of us, and we had no idea what he was capable of when that pride turned to shame.

Father disinherited Mycroft completely, and he likewise withdrew him from Eton. It had proven a den of iniquity, one to which he was never to return. As for me, I was never to go at all. He hired a private tutor for us, and that is how Professor Moriarty arrived in our home.”

Watson stared into my eyes; intent, respectful, and silent. I kept going.

“We were in profound disarray. Mycroft was distraught, though very quietly so. Broken-hearted, not only at the loss of his beau, but also because he saw clearly that our father's love for him had died. I was too young to understand that a parent could change so completely, and I kept waiting for it to blow over and for the life I'd always known to resume. But Father never looked at Mycroft the same way again.

And that is why Mother never looked at Father the same way again, either. On some level, we all sensed it: Mycroft, Professor Moriarty, and me. Even Father sensed it, although he couldn't face it, and his anger toward Mycroft escalated almost to hatred. In some deeply buried part of his mind, reserved perhaps for the likes of our Dr. Freud, I believe Father felt that his son had stolen his wife away from him. At all events, he was horrid to Mycroft, and the further down that path he traveled, the more estranged Mother became.” My voice broke, and I ran a hand across my face. I had never understood why Mother had always been the hardest to talk about.

I pressed on, just a little farther. “Professor Moriarty was with us for a year and a half. He never was the confrontational sort, and it's not as if he stood up to Father. But all the same, he was good to us. To Mycroft especially, I think he more closely resembled a friend than a teacher. My poor brother thought himself lucky in that, for he badly needed a sympathetic ear. There were only seven years' difference in their ages, and the distance between nineteen and twenty-six seemed much smaller, I'm sure, than the gap between the two of us brothers at twelve and nineteen.” 

I wavered, then said, “I’m sure it was for his kindness to Mycroft — to both of us — that Mother liked him.”

Watson was not ham-fisted, and so did not rush to reassure me that Mycroft and I bore no blame in the matter; I grasped that perfectly well, intellectually. He simply rested a hand on my shoulder, thanked me, and said, “She must have been very proud of you both. I would like to hear more of your mother one day.”

By the time we stumbled up to our bedrooms we were exhausted in every conceivable sense, and yet we lingered in the corridor together, unwilling to let the night end on such a melancholy note. 

I asked Watson what we should do tomorrow, and he said that I should take him to the seaside.

“There’s a narrow peninsula beyond the coast; just a ribbon of sand, a few hundred meters offshore,” I told him. “It runs parallel to the mainland for miles. It’s a remarkable feeling, Watson, to stand on that narrow beach with calm inlets behind you and the endless sea ahead. I’ve seen something more of the world since we last parted, but I can’t recall another spot so steeped in — ” I floundered, lost for the right word — “in possibility, I suppose.”

“In promise,” Watson amended softly. “I’d very much like to see it, with you.”

I smiled at him. “Our English tourists call that stubborn stretch of sand ‘the strand,’ you know.”

Watson laughed. “Do they? That settles it, then, we must go. Surely Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson belong together in _The Strand_. I should say it’s meant to be.”

For once in my life, I did not fight to keep my heart from rising to my eyes.

“Tomorrow, then,” I told him. “Sleep well, John.”

He caught my sleeve as I began to turn away. Darting in with impulsive, nervous speed, he brushed his lips to the corner of my mouth. It was a shy, uncertain kiss, there and gone in an instant and light as the wind on the waves. 

“Vivez joyeux,” he whispered in my ear, and took himself to bed.


End file.
